You want to migrate your Oracle Forms to ADF. Knowing that this is a complicated project you wonder whether to hire your own people to do it or outsource it to a company with expertise in migrations. Below you can find six reason why is better to outsource the migration than do it internally.
1. No headcount from you needed – If you are using Oracle Forms it is hardly imaginable that you have ADF developers in your company. ADF is a technology based on Java and has nothing in common with the PL/SQL technology used in building Oracle Forms. The probability that your Forms’ experts don’t have any know-how with ADF is above 99%. To make the migration, you must have not just Java engineers but ADF ones. Considering the market conditions and the fierce competition for the ADF consultants, it is not feasible to hire your own people to do the migration. It’s way smarter to outsource it and involve zero headcounts for the ADF development.
2. Learning opportunity – Outsourcing the migration will allow your Oracle Forms’ experts to learn from the best practices from experts in an ongoing project and to quickly evolve into being able to develop the necessary ADF skills to build your new forms directly in ADF and support the system by their own. This will not only save you money from training and support expenses but will improve the moral of your employees.
3. Time optimization (Instant delivery) – Hiring a company with experience in migrations will allow you for an instant start and delivery once the contract is signed. The alternative of hiring your own people will cost you a lot of time, money and nerves.
4. No Bias – When going for a migration it’s better to involve all the best practices meaning that some Oracle Forms can be combined together to make a single ADF Form, some fields from the old Form can be removed or substituted with new ones and a complete change of the UI may take place for the better. But if you put yourself in the shoes of someone in your company that has used these Forms for many years and then he needs to migrate them, this guy for sure will be biased about what to remove and keep and won’t have the fair view of an expert coming from the outside. Often companies specialized in migration have usability expertise which improves the user satisfaction for the newly migrated system.
5. Best Practices – It is hard for someone who hasn’t done any migrations before to keep and know all the best practices as they are many and some of them really complicated. The best practices can be separated in two:
- Architectural – as ADF standard architecture (MVC) is quite different than Oracle Forms, you need a complete redesign of the existing application. Moreover, in order to get all the benefits from ADF you need to know the SOA and BPM features provided by the framework and apply them in advance.
- Process – there are many ways to improve the migration process (migrate step by step instead of big-bang) and increase the productivity of the team.
- UI & UX – there are tens of new UI features in ADF that will make your user’s life easier. ADF also suggests a lot of wizard-like forms instead of heads-down Forms approach.
6. Cost Decrease – Outsourcing to a company that has expertise in Oracle Forms to ADF migration will save you money especially if this company comes from an Eastern European country like Bulgaria – second worldwide for certified professionals per capita. The cost reductions will come from money saved for training, wages, and support.
[slideshare id=39743619&doc=sixreasonstooutsourceyouroracleformstoadfmigrationsproject-141001045914-phpapp02]
In conclusion, you know now which are the six main reasons for outsourcing the migration but the end decision depends on you. As a final suggestion, I will recommend to contact as many companies with expertise in migrations as possible and then decide what to do.
Good luck. I will be more than happy to hear about what you plan to do in the comments’ section below. I will try to respond ASAP.
